Since the Supreme Court took the issue of abortion off the political table with its 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, the country, unable to resolve the issue politically, has been divided into two mutually loathing camps, pro-life (mostly Republicans) and pro-choice (mostly Democrats). But is it possible to be in both camps at the same time?
The question of abortion is, in fact, two questions; one moral and scientific and one political and legal.
The moral question is when does life begin and, thus, become endowed with an unalienable right to exist? No one, I fancy, would argue that gametes (the sex cells, eggs and sperm) are so endowed. Nor, I hope, would anyone argue that a new-born child is not so endowed. Infanticide is regarded as murder everywhere. Thus somewhere between the formation of a zygote (a fertilized egg) and birth nine months later, the endowment takes place. But when?
Extreme feminists argue that the endowment comes only with the passage of the baby through the birth canal. But that is a political argument masquerading as a moral and scientific one. They want no restrictions on abortion whatsoever and so they pronounce their opinion ex cathedra. Others argue that it is when the fetus becomes viable outside the womb. But that hostages a moral question to technology. Today babies born at five and a half months have about a 50-50 chance of surviving. A hundred years ago six-and-a-half month babies rarely survived. (Winston Churchill, born at seven months, made it.) In the Middle Ages, a time when prenatal ontogeny was completely unknown, Catholic dogma held that the soul entered the body when the baby quickened, that is when fetal motion was first felt. Pro-life people argue that life begins at conception, at the moment when the zygote is formed.
I would argue for the last. The zygote is certainly alive, as it is metabolizing. And it has an utterly unique set of human genes, a particular combination that has never occurred before and will never occur again however long the human race survives. To argue that it is just part of the woman’s body, no different than, say, the appendix, is absurd on its face. Half the time the zygote is not even the same sex as the woman, a rather fundamental difference. More, there is a seamless continuum that leads from zygote to blastula to gastrula to embryo to fetus to baby to toddler to child to adolescent to adult. To purposefully interrupt that continuum at any point is, I think, to commit homicide, the termination of a human life.
Thus, I think abortion is morally indefensible except in rare instances, such as saving the life of the mother (two dead human beings is not a moral improvement on one dead human being). So I am pro-life.
But I’m also pro-choice. I would oppose outlawing abortion if it were politically and legally possible to do so. Why? Because as a general political principle, I think it is always a mistake to outlaw anything that has two particular characteristics. The first characteristic is that a large segment of the population disagrees with the law. The second is that it is impossible to effectively enforce the law. When such laws are passed, there is nothing but unintended consequences — all of them pernicious.
Prohibition was supposed to rid the country of demon rum. It didn’t, and gave us Al Capone. Illegal drugs are about as difficult to buy in any American major city as Coca-Cola. In each case, millions of people in this country want to consume alcohol, marijuana, and hard drugs and alcohol and drugs are very high value per unit of weight. It might be possible to prevent the importation and sale of, say, grand pianos, which are hard to conceal. But when something hardly larger than a pack of cigarettes, can be bought in Colombia for $1,000 and sold in New York City for $20,000, someone is going to make that market. And making a trade illegal makes it impossible to regulate (or tax). Without resource to courts, commercial disputes in illegal trades are settled instead in parking lots, with guns.
In the case of abortion, there are millions of people who are sincerely pro-choice. And there is no practical way to prevent a woman from having an abortion. After all, the only two people who would know that a crime had been committed — the woman and the abortionist —have no motivation whatever to report it. So the effect of outlawing abortion would simply be that well-off women would go to a jurisdiction where abortion is legal and poor women would go to back-alley abortion clinics where the maternal death rate would be far, far higher. Again, two dead human beings is not a moral improvement on one.
Thus outlawing abortion can have only pernicious outcomes however morally correct it might be. To argue that morality and legality should be coterminous would be absurd, even if everyone agreed on what was moral. After all, most of the sins proscribed in the Ten Commandments are not illegal. When you commit them, you have to answer to God, not the courts.
And so I am, reluctantly, both pro-choice and pro-life.
